If you’ve been repeating affirmations, journaling your thoughts, and still feeling stuck… we need to talk.

Because it’s not that you’re doing it wrong.

It’s that these tools aren’t actually designed to create the kind of change you’re looking for.

In this episode, I’m breaking down why mantras and journaling often don’t work—especially for sensitive, self-aware women—and what to do instead.

Mantras can create internal conflict when your brain doesn’t believe what you’re saying.

Journaling can turn into rumination that reinforces the exact patterns you’re trying to break.

So if you’ve ever felt like:

“I should be further along by now”

“I know better, so why am I still stuck?”

“I’ve done so much work, why hasn’t anything really changed?”

This episode will land.

I’m going to show you a different way to work with your brain—one that actually creates emotional buy-in, shifts your beliefs, and changes how you show up in your life.

✨ In This Episode, I Talk About:

• Why mantras often feel empty (and can actually increase anxiety)
• How journaling can quietly reinforce negative thinking patterns
• The role your survival brain is playing behind the scenes
• Why your beliefs—not your thoughts—are what need to change
• The real skill that creates confidence, calm, and lasting change
• How asking better questions can completely shift your emotional state

🔑 What I Want You To Take Away:

You don’t need to force yourself to think positively.

You need to learn how to question what you’re thinking in a way that actually opens something up.

💭 Try This Instead:

Next time you feel stuck, don’t reach for a mantra.

Ask yourself:

• What if this isn’t actually true?
• What would be possible if I believed I was enough?
• How would I show up if I felt fully accepted?

Let your brain answer. That’s where the shift happens.

💬 Want Help With This?

This is exactly the work I do with my clients.

If you’re ready to stop spinning in your head and actually create change that feels real and sustainable, you can book a call with me:

👉 amandahess.ca/bookacall

📲 Come Say Hi

If this episode resonated, DM me on Instagram or TikTok. I’d love to hear what landed for you.

Links referenced in this episode:

theamandahess

amandahessbookacall

Featured on the Show:

• Book a free consultation call with me!
• Send me a DM over on Instagram!

Help Other Women Find This Podcast

• If this episode resonated with you, or you know someone who needs to hear it, please share.
• Leave me a review in Apple Podcasts and let me know what topics you would like to hear.
• Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or RSS.

Full Episode Transcript:

Here’s the transcript formatted in HTML from the uploaded file: “`html

How To Love Yourself No Matter What

Episode 311

Why Mantras & Journaling Aren’t Working (And What To Do Instead)

Amanda Hess
Certified Life Coach & Self-Love Expert

Hey, friend. If you’re journaling, repeating mantras, and still feeling anxious and stuck, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong.

It’s honestly because these tools don’t actually work the way you’ve been told they do. And today I’m going to show you why and what actually does.

Hey, I’m Amanda Hess. I’m a certified life coach.

But what you need to know is I’m a sensitive woman just like you, and I’m going to help you understand yourself better so that you can approach your life differently and feel really good about it. Let’s go.

Hey. So for those of you that are new here, I’m Amanda. I’m a certified life coach and self love expert.

And I work with women who are doing everything right and still not getting the results they want. And if that’s you, you definitely need to listen to today’s episode.

So I want to talk about mantras and I want to talk about journaling today.

And we’re going to go through them one by one and we’re going to talk about what they are, why they are probably not working for you, and what we can do differently to create better results.

So we’re going to start with mantras.

Now, mantras are built on the idea that if you repeat something enough, you’ll believe it.

But your brain isn’t that easy to override. If you’re saying I’m confident while feeling deeply insecure, your brain doesn’t buy it, it resists it.

So instead of creating change, you create internal conflict, which feels a lot like anxiety.

And the truth is there’s just no emotional buy in. And so if you’re a sensitive woman, your brain reads it as a lie. It reads the mantra as a lie.

What I will say to you is, I used to try. I used to try and use mantra. I watched The Secret and I fully believed that the universe was listening.

But no matter how many times I told the universe I was confidently creating the life of my dreams, it didn’t change how I felt and it didn’t change the experience of my life.

I have worked with so many clients who religiously employ positive thinking and mantras, and they cannot understand how to change the way they think because emotionally when they do it, it just feels empty. It feels like an empty promise.

And that’s because mantras skip the most important part, and that’s learning how to be with yourself when you feel uncomfortable, learning how to stop rushing yourself, learning how to be there with yourself in the moment.

Why Journaling Isn’t Always Transformation

Now, let’s talk about journaling.

What you might not realize is that most journaling isn’t transformation. What it is is it’s rumination on paper.

You sit down, you dump your fears, you dump your worries, you dump your frustrations, and then you walk away having practiced those exact thought patterns.

You reinforce everything that you’re thinking. You didn’t process anything. You just reinforced it.

So what I see is women writing about all the things that are wrong with themselves and their lives, and then their brain starts down the path of showing them how it’s true.

And it’s like when you fight with someone, right?

And then while you’re fighting, you start realizing, oh, and you do this, oh, and you do that, and you did this last night, and you did this last week, and you also do this.

And what it’s doing is it’s just lighting up a part of your brain that does more damage rather than actually creating any kind of healing.

And it feels real. And that’s the problem, because the reality is, is your brain is just designed this way.

It’s designed to look for what’s wrong, and it will always find it, and it will always find more of it, but that doesn’t make it real.

So we have to understand that the survival part of our brain is just working on that. It’s working on that in the background. It’s how it’s designed.

It is your survival brain. It is trying to keep you safe.

And so if it identifies danger, even though technically you are quite safe, but if it sees danger, like there’s something going wrong in your work or your relationship or with yourself, it is going to continue to collect that in the background.

And so when we’re journaling, when we’re reinforcing this line of thinking, we involuntarily give it the job to find more of it, and it’s just not effective.

What Actually Creates Change

What I know for certain is that if you’re looking at mantras or you’re looking at journaling, neither of these tools actually changes your beliefs.

And if your beliefs don’t change, then your patterns don’t change, which means your life doesn’t change.

And in fact, your patterns, the really painful ones especially, they get reinforced.

And over time, it starts to feel like this is just who I am.

I’m scattered. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m anxious, I’m depressed. People don’t like me. I don’t have what it takes.

I’m not the kind of person who, fill in the blanks, goes for what she wants, cares about her career, is looking for a real satisfying relationship, has the ability to have a sexually satisfying marriage.

We just say these things and they feel like the truth.

So what I want to do is put you in a place where you are not reinforcing these patterns.

Instead, what I’m going to offer you is something very different and it is a little confronting and it might feel more uncomfortable.

But what I want you to know is you’re already uncomfortable. So what I’m going to ask you is what if you tried on a different kind of discomfort?

Now, it’s very normal to not want to move in this direction. And it won’t like a different approach.

So it will often offer you, this won’t work for me, or I’ve already tried this, but I want you to know that you haven’t.

And also it’s normal for your brain to want to stay with what’s familiar. It wants you to stay in that survival cave. It wants you to be in the cave.

But if you stay in the cave, if you’re staying with familiar, it’s always just going to bring you more of the same.

And what I really need you to know is that you are powerful.

You can change your life, you can change the way you think if you start asking yourself better questions.

Start Asking Better Questions

So instead of telling yourself what to think with the mantra or writing down all the things you’re worried about or thinking already, what I’d like you to do is to start asking better questions.

• What if what I believe right now isn’t actually the truth?
• What would I think if I didn’t believe that this was true?
• What would be possible if I believed I was good enough?
• What would be possible if I believed I was smart enough?
• What would be possible if I believed I was pretty enough?
• How would I show up if I believed people loved and accepted me all the time?
• What would I say?
• How would I react?
• What would I say no to?
• What would I say yes to?

Let’s really talk about that for a minute.

If you went for a job interview and you were feeling scared and intimidated and you were worried you were not going to be picked for the role, what would you need to think about yourself to see yourself as qualified?

Even if you don’t meet all the job requirements, what makes you uniquely qualified for this role?

Especially because you don’t have all the requirements, what part of your personality makes you the perfect fit for this role that they might not even know yet?

Why are you the better candidate no matter who applies?

How is it true that you were the perfect person for this role, but if you don’t get it, your life will actually be better for it?

If you were to write the answer to all of these questions, you would open up a whole new emotional world.

And then after, you can ask yourself, if I believed all of this, how would I show up differently to this interview?

What kind of confidence would I bring with me? And how would that positively affect the outcome?

How would this positively reframe the rest of my job hunt?

It’s a win-win situation.

This process creates hope and possibility in a way that you can truly feel it, which is essential.

You could take all of these questions and apply them towards dating, towards your marriage, towards your friendships, and it is going to change the way that you show up.

And when we change the way that we show up, we change our life.

This is more than just the universe hearing you. This is you hearing you.

This is more than positive thinking. It’s asking yourself the right questions when your brain wants to shut you down with fear.

Yes, when we do this, we are working against our biology.

So yes, it takes effort, but it does get easier with time and practice and everyone can do it.

I will always argue that you already use a lot of effort to try and stop feeling bad.

What if we took that effort and took that energy and placed it elsewhere?

Imagine what you could create.

The truth is you don’t need someone telling you what to say.

You need someone showing you how to ask your brain great questions.

You must learn how to question your thoughts. This is a skill.

It’s not that you don’t already know how to think positively, you absolutely do.

It’s that nothing is actually shifting underneath because you’re not asking yourself the right questions.

Client Transformations

I want to give you a couple examples.

So I’m working at the end of my one-to-one coaching contract with two clients that started with me in January.

And I have to tell you that the transformations have been incredible.

I talked to both of these clients today.

One of them was telling me how she’s been going through a particularly painful few weeks and two of the really painful things that are happening is that two of her dear friends are terminally ill and she was having a hell of a time falling asleep after visiting them both.

And she just asked herself, what do I need in this moment?

And her brain said, sleep.

And she went to sleep.

And that is huge because it’s no drama, no sleeping pills. She knows the questions to ask herself to get her through.

Another one of my clients told me that she just doesn’t feel anxious anymore.

She feels calm and peaceful. And her family has even commented on how different she is.

Her life is forever changed because she learned this skill.

Now, both of these women are seniors, so what I want you to know is that it’s not too late.

These women are brilliant. They have done therapy. They have done the whole self-help circuit.

But this work right here, this is what has made all the difference.

This is the work that creates real change, real empowerment, real confidence, a true, buildable sense of peace.

It’s not forced, it’s built.

Work With Me

And if you’re listening to this and you’re realizing, oh, this is what’s been missing, then the next step isn’t more journaling.

It’s learning how to actually do this.

This is exactly what I do with my clients.

I help you take what’s in your head and actually shift it in a way that feels real and sustainable.

So if you want help with this, if you want someone to actually walk you through it, you can book a call with me.

Let’s ask your brain some new questions and explore what pops out.

You could be really delighted.

Go to Amanda Hess Book a Call to set it up. You and me on Zoom. Let’s talk about it.

All right, my friends, that’s what I’ve got for today.

I think this is a really powerful episode. I hope you loved it.

If you want to share your feedback, come over to theamandahess on Instagram or TikTok.

You can DM me. I’d love to chat with you.

Otherwise, I’ll see you next time. Bye for now.

Outro

Thanks so much for listening today.

If this podcast is helping you, please follow wherever you listen and consider leaving a review.

It truly helps this community grow and allows me to support more women like you.

I’m excited to see you back here next week with a brand new episode.

Until then, take care, friend.

Links

• Amanda Hess Website
• Book a Call

“`